Pages

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Souls on fire with Attitude & Expectations

There’s a study that comes up in almost every book I read on Attitude. It’s a study made by Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal and San Francisco school principle Lenore Jacobson.
The study:
“...They [Robert Rosenthal/ Lenore Jacobson] asked the question: Do some children perform poorly in school because their teachers expect them to? If so, they surmised, raising the teacher’s expectations should raise the children performances as well. So a group of kindergarten through fifth-grade pupils was given a learning ability test and the next fall the new teachers were casually given the names of five or six children in the new class who were designated as “spurters” ; the test supposedly revealed that they had exceptional learning ability.
What the teachers did not know was that the test results had been rigged and that the names of these “spurters” had been chosen entirely at random. At the end of the school year, all the children were retested with some astonishing results. The pupils whom the teachers thought had most potential had actually scored far ahead, and had gained as many as 15 to 27 I.Q. points. The teachers described these children as happier, more curious, more affectionate than average, and having a better chance of success in later life. The only change for the year was the change in attitudes of the teachers. Because they had been led to expect more of certain students, those children came to expect more of themselves. “The explanation probably lies in the subtle interaction between teacher and pupils,” speculates Rosenthal. “Tone of voice, facial expressions, touch and posture may be the means by which often unwittingly-teachers communicate their expectations to their pupils. Such communication may help a child by changing his perceptions of himself.”
-Page 32/33 of “Bringing out the best in people” book by author Alan Loy Mcginnis
The study suggest that your expectation determines your attitude towards that person. Expectations can either bring the best out of people or the worse out of them. Expect the good out of everybody.